In the Cafeteria
by crazywriter10
Summary: Power surges, unopening doors, a stupidly tired Major, flying utensils, a lemon bomb, and classic McKay snark.


This was one of my first Stargate:Atlantis fics, and I'm hoping you like it. It was in response to a challenge on another site. : Hope you like it. : Reviews are like tips: Greatly Appreciated but not mandatory. ;)

By the time he got back to his room, it was so late it was early. Thinking along those lines, Major John Sheppard headed for the cafeteria instead of his bed. Not to mention that his stomach was practically yelling at him for some food. And since it was only 2:15 in the morning, the cafeteria had to be pretty much deserted. Except for the usual scientists, but they didn't sleep anyway, so that was really moot point. It was well-known that Rodney McKay ran on nothing more than coffee and MREs. And that was while he was still in the city itself and not on a mission.

John shuddered. How anyone could like MREs was beyond him. He was military and only ate the things when completely necessary. Pushing open the door to the cafeteria he was met with the sight of a few sleepy social scientists in a corner, and then a far more "active" table featuring McKay himself and his partner in crime, Radek Zelenka. They were no doubt picking on the social sciences in general, and John grabbed a sandwich, fruit (or something that was the Pegasus Galaxy's version of fruit that wouldn't kill anybody upon ingestion), a few pudding cups, and a cup of coffee, and went to join the two scientists.

"Well, if Tracy would have just kept his nose out of that conduit, then everything wouldn't have been fried," Rodney said as John set his tray down.

"It was not his fault," Radek countered, waving a fork around like it was either a magic wand or a pointer. "He did not know that conduit could explode."

"Yes, exactly!" McKay exclaimed, completely ignoring John for the moment and waving his own fork around. "If he'd had enough sense to leave it alone when he didn't know what he was doing, everything would have been fine. It's another classic example of people who think they're smart playing with something they shouldn't."

"Oh, and you don't go around touching Ancient technology on a daily basis to discover what is function," Radek snapped and John felt like he was watching a tennis match. Only there was no scoreboard and he was quite sure he wouldn't be able to figure out who was winning. Could tennis matches end in a tie?

"No, I usually have Major Sheppard here for that," Rodney said, finally noticing John. "By the way, Major, what are you doing here?"

"Eating," John said, opening one of his pudding cups. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that whoever else had been in the cafeteria was now long gone, probably due to Rodney and Radek's increasingly loud tirade about their fellow scientists. "Just got back a little while ago."

"Oh." Rodney looked down at his tray.

"Yeah," John said, looking at his turkey sandwich. "It's was a pretty good trip. Only to the mainland."

"Bartering?" Radek asked.

"Sort of," John said, looking up as the lights flickered.

"If that's Tracy screwing around with something else again, I'm gonna kill him," Rodney glowered, eyes narrowing. He was about to say something else when the lights flickered again and then went out, plunging the room into darkness. "Damn it."

"Well this is interesting," John said mildly, trying to put his sandwich back on his tray and hoping that was what he accomplished. It was so dark, he couldn't really tell. He'd really begun to wonder if he was going sit in the dark for a while when the lights flickered a few times before coming back on. Oh, what do you know, he'd put his sandwich in his pudding cup. Waste of both. Well, maybe turkey and chocolate pudding would be a good combination...

"I need to go down to the lab and see what the hell that was," Rodney said, getting up from his chair. He stomped over to the door waved his hand over the sensor panel. The door didn't budge. He waved his hand furiously a few more times and then slapped his hand on it, turning back to face John and Radek. "Apparently Atlantis has gone into lockdown mode and won't let us leave."

"Seriously?" John asked, getting up and walking over to both McKay and the door.

"No, Major, I'm just fooling around," he said sarcastically. "Of course I'm serious! We're locked in here."

"That's not good." Sheppard looked at the door and missed Rodney's scathing look. John was just feeding the fire. He wasn't even aware that he was doing it, he was that tired.

"Is there any way to contact the rest of Atlantis?" Radek asked, pulling open one of the control panels.

"From here, right now, no," Rodney said, looking at the innards of the panel. "Everything's fried."

John wished he still had on his comm. "Do either of you have your comm on?"

With an expression on his face that clearly said he should of thought of that sooner, Rodney tapped his earpiece and said, "Control, this is McKay, can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear, Doc." Thank somebody for Chuck the technician.

"Can you send a science team down to the cafeteria, we're stuck in here," McKay got right to the point.

"I'll see if I can find Dr. Zelenka, is that okay?"

John and Rodney looked over at Radek.

"Uh, not really," Rodney said. "He's stuck in here with us."

"Rodney, who all is in there with you?" That was Elizabeth. Someone must have notified her.

"Major Sheppard and Zelenka," he said. "We're stuck in the cafeteria and the power outage has fried the control panel near the door."

"I'll get a team put together and send down there to get you guys out," she said, all calm and collected in the face of an emergency.

"Are there any outages left in the city?" Rodney asked.

"No, and everyone is accounted for," she said. "It seems the only problem we're having is where you are, in the cafeteria." She paused. "And what's Major Sheppard doing down there? I thought you were told to rest?"

John flushed a little guiltily and Rodney handed him the radio. McKay wasn't going to get in the middle of that.

"I was hungry," John said, waiting for a response and watching with mild interest as Zelenka wandered away back toward the kitchen. "And I didn't feel like going to sleep yet. But mostly I was hungry."

"Well, we'll have Carson on standby in case something happens," Elizabeth said, the shake of her head obvious in her tone of voice.

John flinched. "Okay. We'll keep in contact." He handed Rodney back his radio and they both watched as Zelenka came back bearing a large cooking pot with an assortment of kitchen tools in it. "What are those for?"

"Getting out of here," the Czech replied and dropped the pot near the door with a thud. Rodney jumped and spun, glaring at his fellow scientist. Radek grinned.

John watched, fascinated, as Zelenka pulled what appeared to be the largest metal turner he could find and inserted it between the wall and the door.

"Just what the hell do you hope to accomplish?" Rodney demanded, looking at Radek like he was a travesty to science itself.

"Insert tool. Pry door open. Get hell out of here." With that, the wiry Czech scientist began to pull backwards on the handle of the turner with all his strength. John had to admit that there was more muscle to Radek than he would have figured and then took a moment to look in the pot. There were more turners, and some large metal spoons, a thing of salt, baking soda, and a few lemons. It looked to John that if they couldn't pry their way out, Zelenka was going to try and blast a part of the door off.

There was a loud snapping noise and John turned just in time to watch a piece of metal from the now-broken turner fly through the air and impact off of Rodney's forehead. McKay staggered backward more from the shock of it than the force (though there was a nice red mark beginning to show) and caught himself on the wall by sheer luck. There was a moment of silence before John smiled and snickered. Radek snorted and then the two of them were bent over double with laughter. Rodney rubbed his forehead and glared at the pair of them.

"Yes, yes, very funny," he said with a wince. "Even funnier when you put an eye out."

John looked over at the part of the turner that was still lodged in the door and watched as a still-chuckling Radek went to pull it out. The thing wouldn't budge and the two of them started cracking up even more. John probably wouldn't have found the situation as funny as he did if it had been a different time and he'd been running on more sleep. As it was, the entire thing was pretty damn hilarious to him at the moment.

"What are you? High?" McKay snarked, looking over at John.

John shrugged. "I'm not operating on much sleep."

"Right." McKay, a red-mark about the size of a quarter in the middle of his forehead, turned back to trying to make the crystals in the console cooperate.

Meanwhile, John handed Radek nearly every other utensil in the pot to use on the door. The third time something snapped and flew Rodney's way, he yelled at them to knock it off before they killed somebody. They were still laughing hysterically when someone pounded on the door from the outside.

"Can anybody here me in there!?"

"Yes, we can hear you!" Rodney shouted back through the door. "Can you open it from that side?"

"Not right now, but we've got a team working on it! It's Doctor Tracy!"

Rodney went pale and John could see him swearing under his breath. He was guessing that if he had the choice between Tracy and Kavanaugh, he just might go with Kavanaugh on this one. Yikes.

"Don't fry this console this time, you idiot!" McKay shouted back through and then turned to look at Radek. "Whatever other concoction you're going to try, hurry up and do it before that moron kills us all." He paused. "What are you going to do?"

"Blow up door." And with that, Rodney moved out of the way so that Radek could get started on building his salt/lemon/baking soda bomb contraption on the crystals to the door. Well aware of the chemical properties of those substances, John tipped over a table to use as a blast shield. Who knew what could happen?

"Blow up the door? Blow up the _door?_" McKay was incredulous. "You're going to attempt to blow up Ancient technology?" He looked at the crazy-haired wiry Czech scientist. Then he got behind the table with John.

"Hold onto pants," Radek said, putting the finishing touches on the homemade bomb and then sprinting behind the "barricade" with John and Rodney. The three crouched down as there was a small explosion that spewed clumps of baking soda and salt everywhere. The scent of lemons wafted through the air for a moment. Like gophers coming out of a hole, three heads appeared over the table and looked at the damage. The console, for the most part, was intact.

"Damn it." Radek sighed, taking off his glasses and cleaning them on his shirt. "Thought it would work."

"Wow." John was sort of awestruck. It was definitely the lack of sleep.

"You just attempted to blow up Ancient technology," Rodney said, staring at the door with a mixture of horror and fascination. He looked over at Czech and then said, "I thought Czechs were descended from Bohemians."

"We are," Radek replied.

"That wasn't a very hippie-esque solution," Rodney said.

"As Cadman says, when in doubt, blow shit up," he said, shrugging.

John found that last comment entirely entertaining and started to laugh again.

"Major," Rodney said in the tone of voice he usually reserved for children, stupid people, and Kavanaugh, "what the hell is wrong with you?"

"You quoted Cadman!" John was looking over at Zelenka.

Rodney didn't say anything in return. Instead, he went over to the door, started to pound on it with his fists, and yelled, "Will somebody get me the hell out of there, please! Anybody! I don't care who, just somebody get me out of here!"

"We're trying, Doctor McKay, you just have to remain calm," Tracy said from the other side.

"You try to remain calm when you have a psychotic Czech and a Major who's sleep-deprived to the point of mass stupidity in here with you!" Rodney bellowed back.

"Hey, I'm not sleep-deprived!" John protested, sitting back on his butt on the floor. He took a deep breath and sighed it out, watching Rodney back away from the door and look apprehensively at the mess-covered crystals. He completely missed the part, apparently, where Rodney called him "mass stupidity" but really couldn't have cared less. Rodney was always saying things like that. If you looked really hard, there was probably a compliment in there somewhere.

Rodney left the door and came back to sit on the other side of the table with John and Radek. "It's officially hopeless from our side. We can just hope that those morons out there can fix it enough to get us out of here."

"How about we play a game to pass the time?" Radek suggested and John nodded like a broken bobblehead doll.

"Prime/not prime?" Rodney said, knowing that John could compete with the best of them, something that had startled him when he'd found out on a previously long Jumper ride back to Atlantis.

"Sure," John said and the three of them sat in a loose triangle on the other side of the overturned table, the sounds coming from the hallway muffled enough so that they wouldn't be disturbed.

"We'll start easy," Rodney said. "31."

"Prime," John said. "79."

"Prime." Zelenka murmured, looking at his fingernails. "243."

"Not prime." Rodney chose to ignore it when John slowly slipped sideways so that his head was resting on Rodney's shoulder. He looked over at Zelenka who confirmed that Sheppard was indeed, out like a light. "797."

"Prime." Radek yawned. "I think Major Sheppard has the right idea."

"Well, I'm obviously not moving," Rodney snorted, John's unruly hair tickling the side of his neck. "He's gone deadweight on me."

"There's not much there to be deadweight, Rodney," Radek said, watching as John brought his legs up and around to curl toward Rodney in his sleep. Tentatively, he poked John's side. Sheppard didn't flinch. "There's not much there."

"Don't poke him!" Rodney snapped, keeping his voice low. He knew what it was like to finally run out of energy and just crash. He also knew that since taking command of the military aspect of Atlantis that Sheppard might not be getting enough rest. A trip to the mainland that was supposed to be routine might not have gone that way. Compound that with a few sleepless nights (he was sure he heard John running by his quarters at odd hours in the morning/night), it was actually only a matter of time before Sheppard crashed and crashed hard.

"McKay, this is Weir, do you copy?"

Rodney reached for his headset and tapped his earpiece again, feeling Sheppard inch a little closer. "McKay here, still in the cafeteria."

"The science team has been unable to get the door open for a couple of hours-- ? Had it been that long? Rodney looked at his watch, and yes, it had been a couple of hours since the power outage. It was now 4:30 in the morning. "-- And Lieutenant Ford and Sergeant Bates are on their way down there to blow the door with C-4, with Major Sheppard's permission."

Both scientists looked at John, dead to the world.

"Uh, that may be a problem." Rodney winced.

"Why, what's happened to Major Sheppard?" That was Carson's distinctive brogue in Rodney's ear.

Rodney handed Zelenka his radio.

"Major Sheppard is...sleeping." Rodney glared at Zelenka who shrugged.

"Sleeping?" That was both Carson and Elizabeth.

"Yes, he's sleeping, so I'm not going to wake him up just so you can ask him if he says it's okay to blow the damn door," Rodney said quickly and rather loudly. Sheppard winced at that one and tried to burrow closer. "And if possible, try to be quiet when you do it so you don't wake him up."

"C-4 explosions aren't exactly quiet, Doctor McKay," Ford said, joining the conversation in Rodney's ear. "But we'll try."

"Can you move him back from the door?" Elizabeth asked.

"We are kind of back from the door," Rodney said, but he looked over at Zelenka who shrugged and nodded. "We'll move back a little further just so we don't get caught in anything, like debris."

"They're outside the door, so you may want to move now, Rodney," Carson said.

"See you in a few," Rodney said, and together he and Zelenka half-carried half-dragged a sleeping Major Sheppard further into the cafeteria and behind another overturned table to use as a blast shield. Hunkering down on the other side, with Sheppard between the two of them, Zelenka and McKay waited for the resounding explosion. When it came, Rodney thought that Zelenka's homemade salt/baking soda/lemon bomb was louder. Oddly, intermixed with the sound of things exploding were the sounds of various thumps that made the table shudder. John hadn't flinched.

Carson was first through the doorway before the smoke had cleared, looking for the three men. Two heads popped up over a table that had various metal odds and ends stuck in it like a bad game of Whack-A-Mole (and boy did Carson wish he had a mallot for the one of them) and he beelined for them, field kit in hand.

"We're fine, Carson," Rodney said as the Scot bent down. Carson paused when he looked at Rodney, squinting at the scientist's forehead. "What?"

"You've got somethin' on your forehead," the Scot said, and Zelenka broke into chuckles again, prompting Rodney to smack him on the shoulder.

"Yeah, I know," McKay said, glaring at Zelenka. "Genius over there tried to pry the damn door open with a bunch of stuff that broke and hit me in the head."

Carson chuckled. After telling Rodney that he was going to probably bruise, he looked over Zelenka (there was nothing really wrong with the Czech except maybe his hair was a little frizzier than normal) and then turned his eyes to Major Sheppard. John was slumped against the back of the table, chin on his shoulder, and fast asleep. After taking his vitals, Carson called for a gurney.

"But, he's not sick, is he?" Rodney asked, watching as they loaded John onto the gurney.

"No, lad, he's just exhausted," the Scot said. "He was exhausted when he got back from the mainland and was supposed to go to bed, but came down here instead."

"He was hungry," McKay said, looking over at their former table, three trays still on it. Even John's where he'd attempted to stuff his turkey sandwich into his pudding cup. "He didn't eat much."

"We'll take care of him," Carson said, patting both scientists on the shoulder and then following John out of the gaping hole in the wall that now served as the cafeteria door.

"Huh, well that was interesting." Rodney looked over at their old table once again and spied his abandoned coffee cup. Looking at his watch once again and seeing that it was only shortly after five, and that in about another hour, the cafeteria would open for breakfast, he went to back to the table.

"Yes, very," Radek said, looking at the projectiles sticking out of the table and their apparent trajectory from the door. "Should we clean this up?" He gestured to the table and then the wall near what was left of the console to the old door that was still spattered with his homemade bomb.

"Nah, that's why we have marines," Rodney said, dumping his tray and old coffee and getting a new cup. Sitting back down, he looked over at the cleaning crew already starting near the hole in the wall and those who had come to look in at what damage two scientists and an Air Force Major could have done in the span of time they were locked in the cafeteria. "They clean everything up."

"It's late," Radek said, dumping his own tray and getting himself a cup of fresh coffee. "So late, it's early."

"Brilliant deduction, Radek," Rodney said scathingly. "Did you come up with that one on your own?"

"Grumpy," was all the Czech said. He looked around the empty cafeteria, blocking out the noise from the hole in the wall. "Why are we still here?"

"Because, my crazy European friend," Rodney said, sipping his coffee, "in another hour, we'll be first in line for breakfast."

Radek nodded and thought back to earlier that morning. He frowned and glared at Rodney. "Why did you call me hippie? I'm not hippie!"

McKay started to laugh.


End file.
